


A Sick Sense of Pride

by bendingwind



Category: Doctor Who
Genre: Gen
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-07-14
Updated: 2010-07-14
Packaged: 2017-11-06 00:16:00
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 4,215
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/412616
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/bendingwind/pseuds/bendingwind
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>In which the Doctor meets River for the first time, and she is willing to do anything to learn his secrets, even if she has to drag them through those pretty lips.</p>
            </blockquote>





	A Sick Sense of Pride

He wakes to a strangely familiar mind and a delicate hand gripping the hair at the back of his head and forcing him to look up. He blinks drug-bleary eyes and finds himself staring into the eyes of River Song, no longer mysterious but also completely without recognition.

He wants to laugh, or maybe vomit.

“Good morning,” she says, and there is a smile on her familiar red lips and a note of song in her voice. She’s happy to be here, and his heart shrivels a little in his chest because he knows what she _could_ be. He tries to see into her mind, and for once no part of it is blocked to him. She is River, the little girl that grew up alone, sheltered by her wealthy benefactors. The young woman who ran away in a fit of anger, and through a series of stumbles and falls found herself the interrogator of one of the galaxy’s largest crime syndicates. And now she is here to torture him, and she has no idea what he will mean to her someday. “I hope you slept well,” she continues, and his mind snaps back to thinking in the present tense, “because I’m afraid we won’t be able to let you sleep again until you tell us what we want to know.”

“What… what is it you want to know?” he asks, and he can read on her mind—like the scent of red wine, floating in the air, he’s never met a more open mind and he doesn’t even have to try—that she thinks the desperation in his voice stems from fear for himself. She couldn’t be more wrong. The little smile on her wine red lips curls up a little farther, and she sashays to a table across the narrow room and hefts something like a heavy silver nutcracker. She studies it for a moment and then brings it over to him.

“Guess what this is?” she asks, and there’s that note of happiness and song in her voice that’s so familiar but so very, very wrong here. He pulls against the kiristeel bands holding his wrists to the arms of his chair, ineffectually.

“Oh, relax,” she says, and now her voice and her mind are a bit exasperated with him. She doesn’t enjoy the cowards. “It’s just a nutcracker. Works really well on fingers, you see.” She bends over him, almost lovingly, and fits his ring finger into the slot. She pushes the handles together, forcefully—those graceful thin arms are deceptively weak-looking—and his bones crunch. He winces, and says, almost pleadingly, her name.

“River.”

She jerks back as if he hit her, her lips parted in an “o” of surprise and her eyebrows drawn together in shock-anger-fear. She slaps him, hard, and then seems to come to the realization of what’s just happened. River straightens and composes her features, but the smile doesn’t return.

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” she says, as if the last several seconds have never happened, and he hears longing for home and friends and peace in her thoughts. “My name is Ruby Datura. After,” she winks at him, “my lipstick.”

“Hallucinogenic, if I’m not mistaken,” he whispers tiredly, “Or do you not wear that yet?” There is confusion and surprise and anger once again on her mind, swirling through the air, but this time she keeps control of herself.

“Poisonous, actually,” she says, and some of her confidence returns. This lipstick defines who she is—beautiful and deadly and all kinds of fascinating. She thinks of herself as a deceptively delicate desert flower, and she chose the name Datura after that. An old earth flower, as beautiful and deadly as she is.

“Ah,” he answers, and she fits another finger into the nutcracker. A crunch of splintered bone and she is pulling away.

“That should be enough for now,” she says, smiling again. “You’ve been around a lot, from what I understand, so surely you know how this will go. Want to save us both some trouble and tell me now?”

“Tell you what?” he asks, tiredly. Perhaps he will, just to leave this place and think for a while. What can he do, to take her from this life she couldn’t possibly be meant to live?

“You, my beautiful lovely Time Lord,” and he fights not to gasp as she calls him what he is, because he never read such a thing in her thoughts—“are going to tell us where we can find Gallifreyan treasure. You can imagine our surprise when we stumbled across a mythical being in a bar on Khirlo, and we want you to take us to Gallifrey.”

His throat closes up and his muscles tighten and choke back a scream. _No, no, no, no, no, no, no,_ he repeats, like a mantra against the pain. _Never again._

She recoils, and confusion wafts through the air like perfume. She’s hearing his thoughts, he’s screaming so loud in his head, and she doesn’t know what to make of it. This, the knowledge that she can hear him as he can hear her, brings him to himself more than anything.

“I can’t,” he chokes out, and she only shrugs and stands, shaking the confusion from her shoulders like rotten leaves.

“You will,” she says, and she marches out of the room. Outside, he can hear her tell the guard to make sure the prisoner doesn’t sleep. Break another finger if necessary, but no more; we don’t want him in too much pain, because that might distract him from the exhaustion.

***

She doesn’t return the next day.

***

Or the next.

***

On the fourth day, he’s starting to feel a bit tired, because even Time Lords need an hour of sleep now and again. He’s just about to drift off and the guards _still_ haven’t come into wake him, when she bangs through the door with another of her familiar wide smiles. Today, her lipstick is magenta.

“You haven’t even asked to see me,” she says without preamble, pouting as she perches on the stool next to him. The guards had used it, as they sat there to shake him every time he began to fall asleep. Her voice sounds cheerfully sulky, but a waft of genuine irritation reaches his mind. Most prisoners would be begging and terrified and screaming if they’d been left alone, with no sleep, for so many days.

The Doctor, however, has been tortured before, and he knows how things go. First the exhaustion—no food, just a little water, no sleep. Days of silence. Then the questionings, light beatings, and then a day of hope. They will stage a rescue, put him in an infirmary, pretend everything will be alright. It’s a shame, really, that they don’t know how obvious of a sham that will be. All of his kind are dead; there is no one who will come to his rescue. He realizes that, once again, she is hearing what his thoughts are sending around the room, and her brow is crinkles in confusion.

“If they’re dead,” she asks, and her voice seems genuine for the first time since he woke in this room, “why are you protecting their treasure? You’re not using it, and they won’t care if we take their forgotten things.” So she knows that the whispers she hears are the things he is thinking. He smiles wanly at her.

“Mildly psychic, I thought so. Can’t. S’all locked away, you see, from everything and everyone. Had to protect the universe and all. I killed them. Every last one.” Her eyes widen, and for a moment he can see-hear-know that she believes him, but her eyes shut down and her mind goes briefly cloudy. When it clears again, he can read the denial there, because if it is true that the treasure is lost forever, she will have failed. She cannot fail.

“Schuu,” she calls, and the burliest guard he’s seen yet enters the room. “Beat him,” she orders, “And follow protocol one. Remember about the time. I’ll be back to see him tomorrow.”

That night, he is allowed five minutes of cruelly blissful sleep before the guard slaps his bruised face and he wakes to excruciating pain.

***

She doesn’t return ‘tomorrow.’

***

However, this break is shorter than the last, and she enters the room with a grim smile on the sixth day. Before, she wore slick black leather; today, she is dressed to work, in a comfortable black shirt and trousers and white apron. White, so that he will see his own blood. Black, so that when she sheds the apron and leaves the room, no one else will be able to see the bloodstains.

“Good afternoon,” she greets again, and she digs two sharp fingers into a particularly nasty bruise on his cheek. He fights not to wince.

“Is it?” he croaks, and she jerks her hand back.

“Is it what?” she asks, staring hard. Her mind screams that he is a puzzle, and she desperately, desperately wants to solve it.

“Afternoon?” he asks, and he allows a tiny smile to creep onto his face. It stretches some of the bruises and probably looks quite grotesque, but it makes her jerk back from him in shock and then, once she realizes what she has done, slap him. Hard. Her hand lands directly on the sore side of his jaw and this time he can’t stop the yelp of pain.

“That’s better,” she says nastily, and she pulls a pair of gloves out of her trousers. “You’ve rubbed your wrists raw,” she explains, and now there’s a hint of familiar exasperation on her mind, “I’m going to have to clean the sores. We don’t want you getting an infection.” She presses a button in the side of his chair, and two new cuffs rise up and fit over his arms, just below the elbows. The cuffs at his wrists disappear into the chair, and she begins swabbing the sores with disinfectant. It stings, but really that’s nothing at this point.

“You should tell us soon,” she chats amiably as she applies infection-fighting gel to his wrists and gently wraps them in bandages. “I’m going to start cutting your fingers off soon, and from what I understand, even Time Lords can’t re-grow lost body parts.” He can’t bring himself to say anything as he watches the back of her blonde head while she works, fascinated and repulsed by the utter peace he can feel coming off of her. She is at ease, describing the tortures she will subject him too, and this disgusts him. At the same time, he is almost sick with desperation to understand. How did this woman become the professor that… but he doesn’t allow himself to think it, for fear that she might hear his mind whispering.

Before she leaves that day, she drives beautiful thin needles through sensitive Time Lord nerves, and he screams and thrashes and cries and babbles desperately about his past, the things he’s done before. It is one of the most horrific days of his life, but as she leaves he can’t help but admire a little how carefully she’s done her research. She turns back and gives him a strange look before she closes the door, as if she heard that on his thoughts. Outside, he can hear a man demanding to know what is taking so long as she explains that’s he’s not human and they can’t expect her to work magic.

***

He passes three more days without food or sleep (and it’s the lack of food that’s really starting to push him into insanity) and each day she spends perhaps half an hour in his company with her thin piercing needles and the buds she places in his ears that emit and horrible high-pitched screaming that makes him want to claw his brain own brain out because _oh god it hurts._ He’s picking up silly human pleas in his desperation. He continues to babble about his past, only barely managing to dance around the times he’s met her, and tells her everything about his life on Gallifrey.

She doesn’t ask about the treasure, for which he is grateful. He’s tired of remembering how very inaccessible that treasure is, and how he’s entirely to blame.

***

She seems more cheerful than usual as she saunters in on the tenth day, a guard behind her with some sort of giant contraption.

“Time Lords,” she says merrily as the guard wheels the machine into position, “have even more sensitive nerves in their wrists than humans, so this should work beautifully. His eyes widen as the guard flips a switch, and a perfect drop of water falls on each wrist. It stings a little, and it will only get worse with time.

 _No, no, no River please no_ , he screams in his head, and he can see misery descend on her as she leaves the room; she can still hear him.

***

The next day she demands his name as he sits there screaming, and promises to give him a half hour of freedom if he answers. He tells her, but she only smiles and leaves the room. He wonders if she can still hear his mental screams of anguish wherever she is in this prison.

***

Three days later and he’s quite sure he’s insane. Two weeks in this hellhole and all he really wants to do is die. Only then he’d regenerate and they’d slice him apart and study him, because that’s the _real_ treasure of the Time Lord. He’s thankful they don’t know it.

Her eyes are a bit bloodshot and there’s a bruise barely showing at her neck when she arrives. “Tell me where it is,” she demands, and there is no pretense at sweetness or interest in her voice this time. Something has happened. “Tell me where the fuck your treasure is. I won’t take any more shit for you, _Time Lord,_ ” she screams, and his sleep-deprived brain finally realizes what the bruise at her neck means.

“They’re beating you,” he says, his voice heavy with sorrow. “I’m sorry.” She screams at the ceiling, a long sound of anger and anguish and the horrible sick feeling of being lost in the world races through the room. He cries for her, salty tears stinging as they run down his battered cheeks, and she stares at him, wide-eyed and panting. Suddenly she’s choking and falling to the ground, and her head’s in his lap and it takes him a minute to understand; she’s sobbing. He wants to reach out and hold her, stroke a hand through this poor, lost little girl’s hair, but there are the kiristeel bonds to think about. Quite unbreakable, those.

 _Come on,_ he whispers to her mind, gentle through the fogginess of exhaustion and pain, _we can leave this place. You can be so much better than this. You don’t need to take beatings for the failures of others. You are so much stronger than this._ And she sobs even harder, gripping the filthy material of pants he’s been wearing for weeks. Half an hour passes as she cries herself out, and he does his best to send comfort to her mind, broken open with grief. He can see the death of her father, the only parent she ever had, and the years she spent shuffled between private schools her inheritance paid for and her caregivers chose. Pain and loneliness and the fear that springs from never hearing anyone tell you you’re special; the fear that led her to believe the only thing she could do, the only thing she was good enough for, was beating secrets out of delicate living beings. Causing pain, because she felt as if she’d never been given anything else.

Slowly, he brings out certain memories for her to look at. Her fifth birthday party, where her father hired actors to play the characters from her favorite story and she and her friends got to join in the reenactment, and the way he swept her up into a hug when she gleefully thanked him after all the guests had gone. The way he told her the story of how she’d gotten her name; River, because he hoped she’d always be strong and keep going no matter what tried to stop her. The friends she had, only he showed her the kind things they’d done—cookies slipped under her pillow on her birthday, a painting of a beautiful river offered when a girl noticed the wall above her bed was bare—rather than the faults River had always dwelt on. The praise in the teacher’s eyes that never made it farther, because the kind of schools she had been sent to discouraged praise for fear it would make the children weak. He allowed her to see all the things she had been afraid to remember, and gradually her crying calmed and then stopped.

“River,” he said, when she was still, and that was enough. She stood, a little shaky, and looked at him for a moment. Then she closed her eyes and took a deep breath. She pulled a dainty bronze dial out of an invisible pocket and dangled it in front of him.

“You have to take me with you when you get out of here,” she says, and her voice is just as shaky as her frame. He nods, and she inserts the dial into the chair and his bonds disappear. He stands and stumbles, and she ducks under his arm to support him.

They take a few stumbling steps to the door before he collapses.

“You won’t be able to make it out like this,” she says regretfully, crouching in front of him. “Honestly, I don’t know why I’m even helping you. This is so stupid. I should just lock you back in that chair.”

“But you won’t.”

“But I won’t,” she affirms, “I want to see what I can become. Do you trust me?”

He nods, because of course he trusts her. He has trusted her from the moment she whispered his name in his ear in that nightmarish library, and he will never stop trusting her. She pulls another delicate thin needle from her apron and pushes it down his arm, and he twitches as energy runs through his veins.

“Time Lord nervous system—this nerve automatically provokes adrenaline, no matter what you’ve been through. You’ve got thirty minutes to get out of here—that blue box of yours is about half a mile away, in bunker B. We’ll knock the guard out and you can take his map.”

“What about—“ he says, because he doesn’t like the way she said _you._

“Get _going!_ With you in this state, there’s no chance for both of us to get away. Go!” And the symmetry of this statement almost kills him with heartbreak.

“River,” he begins, but she slaps him to shut him up.

 _“GO!”_ she screams in his face, and the guard bursts through the door. River tackles him and knees him under the chin—he’s out cold, or maybe dead. Whatever may be said for this beautiful, dangerous, broken woman, she’s utterly merciless when she wants to be.

He dashes from the room, and she’s at his heels.

“I’ll go with you if I can,” she says as they run, “but if I have to, I’m going to break off to distract someone. It’s my fault you’re here, anyway.”

***

They make it halfway before they hear footsteps echoing down a hall. River veers into a tiny out-of-the-way niche in the wall and they stop there for a moment, quietly panting. A group of guards run past them, and River peeks around the corner to watch until they’re gone.

“Listen,” she says, turning to him. “How did you know my name?”

“Already met you,” he says, looking up at her from where he’s leaning on his knees as he tries to catch his breath.

“When?” she demands.

“Well… it’s tricky. I have a time machine, you see, and I’ve run into you a few times but you’ve never met me.” He sends something like a telepathic caress, which she unintentionally returns.

“Okay,” she says, and he can only think what a relief it is to finally have someone believe him on the first go. She ducks out of the niche and sets off at a run.

“Wait, River!” he calls after her, but she doesn’t turn.

“Bunker B, near the front,” she calls without looking at him, and then she’s out of sight. He sets off in the opposite direction, a heavy weight in the pit of his stomach. He’d only cause her trouble if he followed. Twenty minutes later he’s collapsed just inside the TARDIS door, exhausted beyond comprehension. He doesn’t dream of River Song.

***

When he wakes up, two days have passed, and he’s rarely been more grateful that he lives in a time machine. A few simple settings and a lot of levers later, the TARDIS materializes in the same room where he was kept. He isn’t at all surprised to find River locked in a chair there, a group of dark-clad individuals closing in on her.

“Riiiiver,” one of them says, but she’s too busy staring at him to pay attention to them. They turn almost as one to follow her gaze.

“What—“a flame-haired woman begins, but the Doctor levels a look at her that silences her instantly.

“Who are you?” he asks, and his voice is icy. One of the taller men, near the back of the room, actually shivers.

“People you shouldn’t mess with.” A slim, short man steps forward, leveling his own icy glare at the Doctor.

 _“I,”_ he replies, and his voice has rarely been haughtier, “am people you shouldn’t mess with. You’re simply a group of thugs.” The slim man laughs, coldly.

“Sonora,” he says, and the Doctor neatly sidesteps the attempt of a burly but sleek bodyguard to restrain him. He holds up a tiny metal sphere.

“This is a time implosion device,” he says, “You wouldn’t be familiar with the technology; it’s Gallifreyan. Why don’t we trade? I give you this, you let me take River away.”

“River?” This is from the redhead again.

“Or whatever she calls herself. Some kind of poisonous flower. I’ll take her, you’ll take this, we’ll all be happy as clams. Though I’ve never thought clams to be particularly happy. The point is, we all get what we want here.”

The man only sneers in disgust. “How about, you give us that bomb-thing, you tell us where the treasure is, and you don’t get shot. I should’ve known better than to rely on Ruby’s ‘subtle’ methods for gaining information. Every man gives it up if he’s going to die.” He snaps his fingers, and people from around the room raise guns.

“Well, you see, that’s your problem,” the Doctor says, and his voice is both utterly reasonable and a tiny bit angry. “I’m not exactly a man. Not human, anyway, which I thought was the point of all of this. How about a different deal; you give me River, and I don’t set this thing off.” He presses a small button on the side, and the implosion device starts to flash red. “Nasty things, time implosion bombs. Rip your skin off your bones, peel your eyeballs—and it all feels like it’s taking an eternity. Not a pleasant way to go. Won’t affect me, of course; I’m a Time Lord.”

The entire room freezes, and the Doctor offers them a tight smile.

“I thought so. You, Ginger, let River—or Ruby—Flower-girl—whatever, let her out of that thing.” The redhead quickly frees River, who shakily rises to her feet.

“You came back,” she whispers, and for a moment all of her weakness and vulnerability is there at the front of her eyes. Then she stands straighter and it disappears. She walks towards him, pulling guns out of the leg-sheathes of two guards as she comes.

“Now wait a moment—“ the slim man protests as the Doctor enters the TARDIS, River behind him—and the TARDIS caresses River’s mind as it always caresses his, and he wonders what that could possibly mean so he’s a little distracted as River turns. She raises one of the guns, and almost too fast for the Doctor to realize what she’s doing, she shoots the slim man through the face.

“For lying and saying you were offering me freedom,” she mutters, and then she shuts the door behind her.

The Doctor frowns at her, but he can see in her mind that she did it for the rest of the crime syndicate as much as for herself, and he can’t properly protest because… in the end, she is right. He sighs and holds out two hands. She stares at them, and he wiggles his fingers and explains, “The guns.” Warily, she gives them to him, and he chunks them in the rubbish compactor. When she begins to protest, he explains further.

“The first rule of traveling with me, River,” he says, “is that you never shoot unless you have to. This,” and he hefts the bomb cheerfully, “is a Sontaran battery.”

* * *


End file.
